Certainly the gaming revenue situation will not be changed by the time this comes into effect. But personally, I don't see why this will be a reason why operators cannot share full liquidity. It just comes down to attribution.
The French system is 2% of the pot. The Italian is 25% of the rake. The site just needs to track who should be attributed to both the dollars in the pot and the rake contributed by each player, then pay gaming revenue on this. This is already done in lots of jurisdictions (Denmark and UK playing on the dot-com pool). Things are a bit messy but I don't see it as a deal breaker.
I don't think Winamax is staffing up to expand into Italy, Spain and Portugal just to share MTTs.
To answer some questions directly:
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will all players and operators pay same rake/taxes no matter what country they are?
So there are two seperate issues obviously, gaming duty that sites pay, and personal income tax on winnings. Personal income tax is not being changed with this deal so we can leave that to one side for now.
Regarding gaming duty, operators will declare their gaming revenue to each jurisdiction they hold a license. They will need to operate under license in each of these European countries, pay gaming duty as normal - the only change is liquidity between jursidictions can be shared. They attribute the size of pots (in France) or the total rake collected (in the other countries) based on which players contributed to the pot, and from what country they are in. Systems like this are already in place in regulated dot-com sites (UK, DK, BE, etc)
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will be different taxes and rake models depending on what country you are?
For operators, taxes differ yes. In terms of rake models, I don't see how you can have multiple rake models on the same table.* They will need to set a rake that I guess is a middle ground between the sites that covers their costs (in France, in particular, which charges agnostic of rake).
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both scenarios can bring up a lot of issues to be settled...
Nothing that hasn't been handled before, though.
* So a few years ago PokerStars put out a press release or blog post that said they were working on a solution that would allow them to do exactly this - to charge different rake depending on the location of the player. Can't find a link to the blog post or story about it, but I know I wrote about it at the time. I personally can't visualize how that would work. Seems simpler to me to use rewards to "rebalance" the differences in gaming duty in different jurisdictions.
Last edited by Hood; 07-03-2017 at 04:06 AM.